


Push

by frecklesarechocolate



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Angsty Schmoop, Arguing, Cas needs to figure out who he is, Castiel-centric, Dean's a little clueless, Fluff and Angst, Human Castiel, Kissing, M/M, This is almost entirely about Cas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 11:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2066154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frecklesarechocolate/pseuds/frecklesarechocolate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cas argue and Cas leaves the bunker.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Destiel Ficlet challenge](http://destielficletchallenge.tumblr.com/). My prompt was "Person A and Person B get in a huge argument and one of them threatens to leave the other."

“I’m not a child, Dean. I don’t need to be protected!” Cas spits the words out like venom.

“I never said that!” Dean shouts back. “I just think you need to be careful!” Dean throws his arms up in the air, like he’s lost patience with the conversation. Cas thinks this is patently unfair, given that  _he’s_  the aggrieved party here.

“You never had to  _say_  anything! You just go off on hunts, sneaking away in the middle of the night–”

“I never sneaked anywhere!” 

“Dean, shut up!” Cas says. He steps forward, poking Dean in the sternum with the tip of his finger to emphasize his point. “You don’t trust me. You don’t think I can be useful anymore.”

Cas takes Dean’s reluctance to reply to this as agreement. After a long moment of floundering for an answer, Dean says, “You’re human, Cas! You can’t…”

Cas flinches, the truth of it hitting him square in the face. He  _is_ human. Weak, vulnerable, and yes, useless. He can’t fight the way he used to, reflexes are off, and fitting into the skin of this body, what once was his vessel, is like wearing something where all the seams are just slightly off and half of the outfit is soaking wet. Nothing sits properly, and it all feels too heavy.

“You’re right,” Cas mumbles, and for a second, Dean looks triumphant, like he’d scored a point. Cas turns, casting about for his shoes. Finding them, he shoves his feet inside, bending down the heel and not caring that they’re still tied. He grabs a fistful of items from the dresser: keys, a few wadded bills and some random coins, the jetsam from the pockets of yesterday’s jeans.

“Cas–” the victorious look falls from Dean’s face, but Cas just glares at him. Shoving around Dean, Cas tries to think of something to say, but bitterness hangs in the room like a poisonous fug, leaving a copper taste in his mouth.

The hallway echoes with his shuffling footsteps, and though he tells himself he’s not straining to hear Dean chase after him, he is.

The Lincoln Continental is out back, behind the bunker, shrouded by a large prairie shrub. Cas slides behind the wheel and slams the door shut. The ancient smell of stale cigarettes and cracked vinyl floods his nostrils. All he wants to be is away. Gone from the oppressive underground dank of the bunker, the overwhelming concern from Sam, Dean’s constant worrying.

Firing up the car and peeling away with a scrape of rubber against gravel feels at once liberating and terrifying. Cas gets to the end of the road and doesn’t hesitate before he turns left.

He drives for hours, stopping once to refill the tank. His cell phone rings constantly for the first hour, chiming with voice mail and text messages, all of which he ignores. By the time the sun’s dipping below the horizon, Cas feels rubbed raw, his eyes gritty with exhaustion. He spies a motel from the highway and pulls off, parking in a cloud of dust. 

The clerk inside barely looks at Cas during the entire check-in process, his gaze trapped by whatever’s on his phone, which rests on the counter next to his elbow. Cas pays for the room from the wadded bills he’d taken off the dresser - was it only a few hours ago? It felt like years.

The Winchesters have stayed in some depressing examples of motels through the years, each with decor more hideous than the last, but Cas doesn’t think that they’ve stayed in one quite like this. The room has a deep funk of body odor and mildew. Cas traces the source of the mildew to a dark patch in the bathroom ceiling above the end of the tub. The bed looks barely wide enough to fit a grown man, and is covered by a hideous orange blanket with nubs of cotton, giving it a rumpled, uncomfortable look.

Cas plops down on the side of the bed and rubs his eyes. As he’d driven, he’d come to the realization that he had nowhere to go. He can’t keep driving, gas and motels cost money, and he’d only grabbed about forty-two dollars from the dresser when he’d left. He has another small amount of cash in his wallet, but it wouldn’t last him very long. 

He opts to ignore the money situation in favor of paying attention to the grime situation. The dirt and exhaustion from being on the road for so many hours weighs on him, and despite the mildew in the bathroom, the shower calls to him. 

The water comes out of the showerhead in a trickle, the temperature barely making it to something that could be considered lukewarm. However, the soap is fresh from its wrappings, and he washes away the dirt from the day, letting it sluice down the drain. 

The face he sees in the mirror looks drawn and tired, and he can’t quite reconcile what he sees with his self-image. For a moment, he almost sees double, his angelic form hovering beneath his skin. It’s gone in an instant though, and he huffs a dry laugh at his own expense. That part of him is gone forever, which is why he’s in this situation in the first place.

He scrubs his head roughly with the towel, leaving his hair sticking up in all directions, and shuffles into the main room. It’s still early yet, barely eight o’clock, but he’s mindful of his dwindling supply of cash. He slips beneath the sheets on the bed, and is pleasantly surprised to find that they’re clean and actually smell somewhat fresh. 

Lights from the highway flash occasionally across the ceiling, and the television in the room next door blares a game show. It still doesn’t drown out the sounds of rather athletic sex that the occupants of the room seem to be having. Cas rolls over and pulls the pillow over his head, but that leaves him alone with his thoughts, and he’d rather not be there at the moment.

The thoughts intrude anyway, images of Dean’s triumphant face, twisted into something mocking. The small, yet insistent and haranguing voice that whispers to him, “You’re not wanted, you’re not needed,” over and over. When did being wanted or needed become something that Castiel desired? It had always been about doing what he’d been ordered to, then about the pursuit of free will.

Yet somehow, being needed and wanted have settled into Castiel’s bones, bones that are now his, and he can’t shake it. More than that, though, is the desire to be useful. As an angel, Castiel had always had some kind of mission. Follow orders. Rescue the Righteous Man, allow the seals to be broken. Then it was to pursue free will, reinstate order in Heaven, correct his mistakes, stop Metatron.

Fully human now, bereft of his grace, all Castiel has is… what? He can’t grasp what that is, and as his phone lights up with another call he’s going to ignore (he’d put the phone on silent ages ago, but it still makes its presence known with irritating regularity), he feels the ground torn out from beneath him. 

Castiel has nothing. He’s left his friends, his only friends. He’s left the best friend he’s ever had, the only person he’s loved and exchanged him for a questionably smelly motel room with a raucous soundtrack of sex and Wheel of Fortune.

His phone lights up again, but winks out immediately - a text, not a call. Cas rolls over so his back is facing away from the phone, the lights from the highway, and sinks into the mattress.

* * *

Something startles him out of sleep, and he sits up, disoriented. Rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he takes in his surroundings. The ugly bedspread lies crumpled at the foot of the bed, and the mildew stain on the bathroom ceiling winks at him from over the top of the doorway. 

Right. He’s in a motel somewhere four hours west of Lebanon in Adams County, Colorado. There’s nothing but flatlands for miles in all directions but one, where the mountains rise up out of the ground like a behemoth. 

And he’s alone.

Before Castiel can dwell on this, there’s a pounding at the door, and he remembers that this is what woke him up. 

“Cas! Goddammit, open up!” It’s Dean’s voice, and he sounds frustrated. The door rattles in the frame with the force of his pounding.

Cas swings his legs over the side of the bed and shuffles over to the door. He barely has it open before Dean’s pushing his way into the room, wild-eyed. He fills the space with his presence while he runs his eyes over Cas, taking in the wildness of Cas’s hair and his sleep-puffed face.

“Jesus Christ, Cas.” Dean wraps his arms around Cas and pulls him close, burying his face in Cas’s shoulder. “I thought you–” he mumbles, his voice muffled by Cas’s body. Cas stands stiffly in Dean’s arms, but Dean doesn’t let go. If anything, he holds on more tightly. “‘M sorry,” he says, over and over.

Cas pulls back from Dean, tamping down on the feeling of loss as he does. Dean doesn’t let Cas get too far away, cupping his face between his palms. Cas lets him, leaning into Dean’s right hand a bit, his eyes roving over Dean’s face. It’s at once so familiar and a bit alien – the freckles spattered all over his cheeks and eyelids, the softness of his mouth, the crinkles around his eyes. But the depth of emotion in his green eyes is what’s unfamiliar to Cas - and Dean smells a bit of desperation.

“Don’t…” Dean leans forward for a kiss, but Cas breaks Dean’s hold.

“Dean.” It’s the first word he’s spoken since he left the bunker yesterday, having only nodded when the motel clerk had asked if he’d wanted a room. Rusty with disuse, his voice sounds hollow. “Why are you here?”

Dean stands stock still, dumbfounded. Then, “What do you mean? I’m here for you. For…. To apologize.” The ‘you idiot’ goes unsaid, but it still rings loud in the room.

Cas shakes his head, pulling even further away. “What are you apologizing for?”

Dean’s mouth works, opening and closing a few times. “For making you angry.” It’s the wrong answer, and Dean realizes it the second he says it. “I mean…”

“Dean.” There’s a million emotions in that one word, a thousand things unsaid, and over seven years of friendship in it, and Cas wants nothing more than for things to be fixed between them. He wants to set it right, but he can’t do that all on his own.

“I promise, I’ll take you on hunts, Cas.” But Cas is shaking his head again. He cringes a bit at the despair in Dean’s voice. “It’s not just the hunting, Dean. It’s–” Cas sits on the edge of the bed, and Dean settles next to him. Though there’s only an inch or two between them, it feels like a gaping chasm. Cas spreads his hands. “It’s that somehow I always feel like a ‘baby in a trench coat’.” He makes the finger quotes. “I need to know that I’m useful.”

“Sam and I don’t think about you that way. We –  _I_  – don’t want you around because of what you can - could - do. I don’t just need you because you’re an angel.” Dean works his way through the sentences slowly and carefully, as if he’s in a fiddly china shop and at any moment he could knock something priceless to the floor. 

“You’re not listening, Dean. I need to feel useful. It’s… I’ve always had a purpose, and now I don’t. If I can’t help you with hunting, then I need to find something else. And you need to trust me to take care of myself, either on a hunt or by myself, doing something else. I can’t just be in the bunker all the time, taking Dean Winchester’s ‘Humanity 101’ course.” The corner of Dean’s mouth lifts up at that, and he nods like he understands.

“Yeah, ok. I get that.” Dean sighs heavily. “Can you… Would you come home, though?” Dean looks around the room, takes in the depressing decor, the mildew stain on the bathroom ceiling, the weird orange bedspread. “Come on, even listening to Sammy snore has got to be better than this dump.”

Cas snorts. “The sheets are clean,” he feels the need to point out. Dean gives them a cursory glance and nods, the corners of his mouth turned down as he agrees.

“Come on Cas, let’s go. I promise to be less of an asshole from now on.”

“Don’t make promises you know you can’t keep, Dean,” Cas says. He can tell what this banter is - Dean’s deflecting away from the heaviness of their earlier conversation. His eyes are everywhere else in the room but on Cas’s face, avoiding contact and  _feelings_  and  _emotions_. 

“Hey!” Dean says, taking umbrage at Cas’s barb. “I’m not an asshole all of the time.”

“So you admit that you’re an asshole some of the time?” Cas replies, and he knows he should stop this, because they’re getting further away from the problem, the reason he’s here, and not back at the bunker. “I’ll come back to the bunker Dean,” Cas says, and Dean’s face lights up. “But I want my own room.” Cas rushes on to prevent Dean from interrupting. “For a little while, anyway. I just need time.”

Finally Dean makes eye contact with Cas, and they stare at each other for a long moment. Then Dean nods curtly. “You wanna follow me back in that clunker?”

“Yes. I’ll be behind you.”

If Dean realizes that Cas didn’t actually say he’d follow, he doesn’t remark on it. He claps Cas on the shoulder and then, hesitantly, presses a kiss to Cas’s lips. “See you back at home, then.” 

He stands up, reluctant to leave Cas there, but it’s Cas who calls him back. “How’d you find me, anyway?”

Dean looks abashed and scratches at the mottled brown carpet with the edge of his boot. “Turned on the GPS in your cell.” He flushes. “We were worried.” He shrugs his shoulders and then leaves. Cas can hear the Impala rumble to life, but it takes Dean a few more minutes to pull away from the motel and get back on the road. Calling Sam, probably.

For his part, Cas lingers. Not in the motel room, which he abandons as soon as he’s dressed, but Adams County, Colorado. He drives around for a little while, taking in the sights, of which there are few, before stopping at a Biggerson’s for a cup of coffee. He gets it to go, in a cup that’s hot to the touch, but warms the tips of his fingers, which have been cold for the last day or so. He cradles it in the palms of his hands, not unlike Dean had done with his face earlier that morning, and sits on the hood of the Lincoln. 

He texts Dean and Sam to say he’s taking the long way back, but not to worry. He  _is_ coming back. 

It takes him another half day to get back to Lebanon. The amount of wide open space in Kansas never ceases to fascinate him, and he lets himself be distracted by sights that he’s probably flown over a hundred times before. He sees things as a human now, more forest than trees, as it were. Fields of prairie grass that shift with the wind snag his attention, and he watches for so long that in one case, a farmer comes by on his tractor and asks if Cas needs help with anything.

Cas smiles at him. “No, thank you. It’s quite beautiful,” he waves at the field.

The man squints at him. “If you say so.” He leaves Cas to his contemplation, and after another moment, Cas gets back in the Lincoln and heads back toward the Winchesters and Lebanon.

Cas is well and truly tired of the road by the time he rolls into Lebanon, and he’s grateful for the shower room and the wonderful water pressure. He waves a greeting to Sam, who’s in the library, and trudges to the back of the bunker.

After his shower, he changes clothes – the first time since he’d left the bunker – and seeks out Dean. Unsurprisingly, Dean’s in the kitchen, chopping up tomatoes with precise movements of the kitchen knife. Cas waits until Dean pauses and then makes his presence known.

“Hello, Dean.”

Dean’s back stiffens, but when he turns there’s a smile on his face. It doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Hey, Cas. You hungry? I’m making tacos.”

Cas nods. “Can I help?” There’s an array of brightly colored vegetables on the counter: bright red tomatoes, green and orange peppers and a large onion.

“Have at it.” Dean points the knife at the peppers. “Those need to be chopped pretty finely, I’m going to sauté them with the beef.”

Cas picks up the orange pepper and begins chopping it, the kitchen knife comfortable in the palm of his hand. They work side-by-side, the only sounds in the room that of their chopping and slicing. Cas moves on from the peppers to mince the onion. Dean supervises for a brief moment, nodding in approval at Cas’s work.

Soon enough the smell of cooking onions and peppers fills the kitchen, wafts out into the rest of the bunker. Sam drifts in while Dean browns the beef and Cas shreds the lettuce. By the time the meat is fully seasoned and cooked properly, Sam has made the table. There’s an almost uneasy silence between the three of them, like they’re each waiting for one of the others to speak, for another shoe to drop. 

After dinner, Sam cleans the dishes, and Cas drifts into the library. Dean follows not far behind. He’s been on tenterhooks since Cas returned, but he’s not wanted to break this uneasy peace so he’s kept his thoughts to himself. He worries, though, that Castiel will leave again. It fills him with an icy dread that he can’t quite vocalize. Instead he says, “I made up a bed in one of the rooms at the other end of the hall.” He means on the opposite end from their room – from Dean’s room. 

“Thank you,” Cas replies, and he hopes that it won’t always be this awkward between them. Cooking together had been nice, comfortable, but this… Palming the back of Dean’s neck, Cas pulls him closer and rests their foreheads together. He closes his eyes, and he can feel the flutter of Dean’s eyes closing as well. “Thank you,” he says again, his voice almost a whisper.

“I’m glad you’re home, Cas.” 

Kissing Dean is easy then. When they break away for air, Castiel says, “I’m glad this is still my home.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Cross posted on my [tumblr](http://deanhugchester.tumblr.com/post/93548445095/written-for-the-destielficletchallenge-my-prompt).


End file.
